CIRCA 1815, THE DESIGN ATTRIBUTED TO LORENZO SANTI

These impressive chairs were almost certainly part of the large and celebrated suite of seat-furniture supplied to Napoleon I’s uncle, Cardinal Joseph Fesch (1763-1839), probably for his Roman embassy, the Palazzo del Buffalo-Ferraioli in the Piazza Colonna. From a design of circa 1806 by Dionisio Santi (b. 1784-86) and/or Lorenzo Santi (1783-1839), as published in the former’s Modèles de Meubles (1828), the suite consisted of at least ninety-six pieces, most of which were recorded in an inventory, dated 1815, of Fesch’s Parisian hôtel Hocquart de Montfermeil; the suite comprised chaises, fauteuils, canapés and causeuses. In this number but not described separately there were at least three stylistic variations: a suite with triangular pediments, as in the case of the present lot, a group with arched pediments, and an ‘acanthus-tailed griffin suite’ (L. Wood, The Upholstered Furniture in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, vol. II, New Haven and London, 2009, p. 744). Many of the chairs from the suite bear chiselled Roman numerals, as found on the pair offered here (ibid., pp. 738-756).
Some of the suite was subsequently sold in the sale of Fesch’s Parisian house in the rue de Mont Blanc, 17 June 1816 and following days, lots 444-446, while the balance possibly remained at Fesch’s archiepiscopal residence at Lyon. Fourteen pieces were bequeathed to Fesch’s home town of Ajaccio, Corsica, and a large part was inherited by his principal heir, Joseph Bonaparte, King of Spain and comte de Survilliers (1768-1844); this was later acquired by Prince Anatole Demidoff for the Villa San Donato, outside Florence, illustrated in two watercolours by Fortuné de Fourrier, dated 1841, of the salle de Bal. The San Donato sale, held by Charles Pillet et al, 15 March 1880 and following days, included sixty-one pieces from this suite, and marked the date of its wide dispersal.
The antiquarian and collector, William Beckford of Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire, almost certainly purchased his set of Fesch seat-furniture, with triangular pediments, from the Fesch sale in 1816. These were illustrated in John Rutter’s Delineations of Fonthill, 1822, and were sold in the Phillips 1823 Fonthill house sale, comprising twenty-two chairs and six stools, ‘The Grand (Damask) Drawing Room’, probably lots 1534-1540, to the 3rd Marquess of Londonderry (ed. D.E. Ostergard, William Beckford, 1760-1844: An Eye for the Magnificent, New Haven and London, 2001, p. 432, no. 53). Three further armchairs from the Beckford sale entered the collection of Sir Frederick Lewis, 1st Baron Essendon (1870-1944) and were sold at Christie’s, South Kensington, 18 February 2007, lots 214 and 216.